Anslem Meets Jess: More Truth and Subjectivity

The restaurant industry is a fast and free-flowing universe, with countless comments, jokes, implications, scattered conversations, and random observations lost amongst the crevices of time in between running food and taking orders.

It started with me bragging that I could prove God with a simple six-step proof in an undeniable way. I was very smug and content about it, which is probably why Jess decided to call me on it. In between running an errand, I dropped off a piece of paper at the bar that read thusly

1) God is the greatest conceivable being; that is, He is the being of which none greater can be conceived.
2) God must exist either at least in theory, or in reality as well as in theory.
3) God at least exists in theory.
4) But God cannot exist only in theory, because if God existed only in theory, then we could conceive of a being that is greater than God, namely, one that exists.
5) Got cannot exist only in theory.
6) God must exist in actuality.

“I don’t know about this,” she said, looking it over skeptically. “I think I can see a hole in it.”
I shook my head, still smug.
“There are three possible objections to this theory,” I said, “and I know all the counter-arguments. Go on, try me!”

After a while (for we were interrupted frequently by the duties at hand), Jessica raised a fourth objection:

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘it doesn’t matter’?” I asked
“I mean, it doesn’t matter that you can prove God on a piece of paper. If a person has not experienced God personally, then this can’t convince them; and if they have experienced Him personally, then they don’t need this.”
She waved the proof lightly in the air, and it was then that I realized that my unstoppable, iron-glad proof was only a flimsy piece of paper fluttering in the breeze of the central air.

This, I believe, is the most simplistic and clear-cut example of what “Truth is Subjectivity” means. Truth, as expressed by the proof, is one thing: absolute, logical, unfaltering, and unchanging. But the problem is that a person cannot come to grips with it merely as information. Jess and I accepted it, true, but only because we had already accepted God. Someone else might deny it because they have already denied God. For a minute I stopped still as the hustle and bustle of the restaurant flowed around me; for a moment I was confounded as to exactly how irrelevant all the logic and reasoning really was.
“It doesn’t make a bit of difference,” she explained, pouring a glass of wine out and handing it across the bar to another server. “It all goes back to the person.”
Every person, I realized, must come to grips with the Absolute on their own terms. How could they otherwise? Just as every person is different, as different people think in different ways, so too are their paths, though they all end up in the same place.

All the logic in the world wouldn’t appeal to someone who didn’t care about proofs in the first place.

2 Responses

Well done, Jessica. As I’ve said before – in so many less direct and probably less effective words – often times, logic just doesn’t matter.

Just out of curiosity – what’s your counter to the counter-argument that says that you can’t make an absolute statement out of definitions of words alone? I’ve heard that argument before, so I’m just curious about what you came up with.

I have never encountered that argument, except in some form of Wittgenstein which I generally disregarded.

I want to say, off the top of my head and without any thought whatsoever, that if an absolute statement cannot be made in words, then there can not be absolute statements.

But this is absurd, because absolute statements can be made with numbers, and numbers can be translated into words.
Therefore absolute statements by way of words are possible.

I realize that this is a function of words to yield absolute statements, but the sentence,
“This sentence is an absolute statement” is self-justifying and needs no defense; so it would appear that words-statements of an absolute nature can be made, even if they are self-referencing (or maybe BECAUSE they are self-referencing…)
Think about it; tell me what you come up with.